Irene turned out to be a pain in the ass. The night brought darkness and we were ready for it: candles, lanterns and flashlights. But I wouldn’t have chosen to spend this weekend with anyone else but my Goils, my best girlfriends from college. Effie lives in Warwick, so I see her quite frequently. Ingrid lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her husband and toddler Greta, who traveled with her up to Rhode Island. Effie’s new house was the chosen abode for our girl power weekend. We knew that having an almost-three-year-old there was going to require some adjustment and we planned on tiring Greta out every single day, so the nights would be spent catching up. Hurricane Irene ended up creeping up as a tropical storm and even though we all knew that she was coming, as much as we thought we were prepared, we realized that the weekend was going to be extended a few days. Not a bad thing, but not a wonderful thing when we, Western civilization, are used to electricity for all our gadgets and our daily and nightly comforts.
I think one of us made the analogy of camping. I have never camped in my entire life. You can’t take the city out of this currently suburban girl. I like my comfort, being a Taurus, aka an Earth sign. So camping has never enticed me. Effie mentioned a camper, and I had to remind her a camper has electricity, as far as I knew, and that was more than what we had. So Ingrid’s Jet Blue flight had been rescheduled for Tuesday evening. We lost power on Sunday at 9 am. Turns out that Effie did not have a cooler, so even though she had stocked up beyond belief for our Goils weekend, she had not thought beyond candles, flashlights, and batteries. So she went out and got a gigantic cooler and a few bags of ice, while Ingrid and I figured out what we were going to do with a full fridge and freezer.
I am by no means a grill master. I usually don’t touch outdoor gadgets (unless it’s an electrical hedger that I can pretend to be a weapon), so I could imagine the operations of a grill, but was not proficient at it. Ingrid doesn’t grill and neither does Effie. So, I went out and even though Effie’s grill had been placed in the garage, we manually opened the garage door, and I figured out how to turn on the propane tank. I read some of the instructions inside the tank door and realized for some reason, the ignition wasn’t self-starting as it was supposed to. Good thing we had lighters. In the attempt to get the grill working, I discovered that two of the burners weren’t working properly, as flames were spewing from the metal knobs. I realized then that the grill hadn’t been properly put together, so nearly half was non-operational. So I had one grilling area and one searing area and the side burner. After much metal brushing to burn off and remove the crud, my MacGyver self was successful at using it to grill meats, warm up leftovers and make breakfast for the following days.
Our dependence on electricity is mind-blowing. I couldn’t charge my Blackberry. The lines were down for me to get internet on my phone, then the phone lines were down that I couldn’t get any reception due to the mad winds of Irene. I couldn’t power up the phone or my laptop – I had thought I would have been able to at least do a little work at the computer, but Irene wasn’t having that. I couldn’t even update my Facebook status to let my relatives and friends on the other side of the Atlantic know that Irene hadn’t swept me away to California. TV and cable were down, of course, because of the electricity being gone. Did I mention Irene was a pain in my ass?
The great thing about not having electricity was truly bonding with my girlfriends. Not only did we have productive and meaningful conversations, we were sharing ourselves during a state of multi-statewide emergency. We also noticed that right after Irene’s angry winds, Effie’s neighbors were outside, doing damage control to their yards. We even removed a gigantic branch from Effie’s pool. and amidst all of this, we had to entertain Greta. Neither Effie nor I have children, but Effie is a teacher and used to kids, so even though Greta couldn’t watch her habitual Curious George on her portable DVD, we were trying to tire her out physically and I ended up doing headstands in Effie’s basement and a joyful Greta trying to copy me. I don’t remember the last time I had done headstands, but I suspect it had been more than a decade.
I imagine in the old days when there was no refrigeration, and there were no electronic distractions and dependencies that people had to actually sit at a dinner table and talk to one another. Food was obtained the same day in the markets and the butchers, in the bakeries and the milkman would come to your door, and people talked to one another. Here we are in the following century and we don’t need to deal with people as often. We have alienated ourselves and electricity is the gluing culprit. We make a call, we talk to a machine, and sometimes for longer than we wished for. We all stare at a screen for hours, whether it’s a handheld or cinema-size. Some of us stare at it and type the whole day, and our emotions go on a rampage when these electronic things man has invented provoke near fatal experiences in our health. We have become slaves of the electronic era and as much as electricity is a beautiful thing, it can also be an isolating one. So, light up a candle, open up a bottle of wine and share your soul with another and ask how their day was, face to face. You might just get a very colorful answer.
